The Vision of Kings

Essay - Covering a vast panorama of history and tradition

The related catalogue, that appeared three years later, divided Indian art according to medium, such as 'Sculpture', 'Paintings' and 'Textiles and ‘Minor Arts’. The Double figure of a lion (illustrated above) is one of two objects from this first exhibition now included in The Vision of Kings. More recently, a number of major exhibitions of Indian art have formed the backbone of Festivals of India in the United Kingdom (1982/83), the United States (1985) and elsewhere (including France, Germany and Russia). Undoubtedly, the most ambitious of these was the 1982 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London — In the Image of Man: The Indian Perception of the Universe, through two thousand years of painting and sculpture. The thematic approach successfully illustrated the all-encompassing nature of Indian art but, even with the help of nearly five hundred sculptures and paintings, the curators evidently encountered the problem of finding appropriate works of art to illustrate some preselected themes, such as ‘The Abundance of Life’ and The Four Goals of Life’.

Most of the other exhibitions resorted to chronological, stylistic and regional divisions. Important exceptions have been the Aditi exhibitions (featured at both the British and American Festivals of India), celebrating the living arts of India through craft objects as well as performing artists, and B.N. Goswamy’s Essence of Indian Art (held at the Grand Palais in Paris and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in 1986), exploring Indian art through the nine rasas or aesthetic sentiments of Indian art theory. At the Asia Society Galleries in New York, as part of the American Festival of India in 1985, this author was co-curator, with Glenn D. Lowry (recently appointed Director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York), of an exhibition that focused on the reign of just one Mughal emperor in the second half of the sixteenth century – Akbar’s India: Art from the Mughal City of Victory. The benefits of such a narrow focus, however, have seldom bee enjoyed by curators of Asian art exhibitions in Australia. As part of the process of providing new art experiences for our audience, it seemed clear that the National Gallery's first major Indian exhibition would have to combine breadth of coverage in terms of cultures and chronology with a presentation stressing broad themes over matters of stylistic evolution.

With The Vision of Kings, the National Gallery is providing a provocative but flexible context in which viewers can construct their own relationship with the art of India.

The concept of darshana was selected as a starting point for the exhibition. This term means 'seeing' or 'auspicious sight'. In Hindu worship, the sculpted image of the god is regarded as an actual manifestation of the deity. Carved with their eyes wide open, they 'give' darshana to their devotees who 'take' it as part of their rituals of worship (puja). On the other hand, images of the Buddha, with his eyes half-closed and cast downwards in meditation, serve only as a model for the state of perfection towards which the devotee is striving.

There is no need for the Buddha to exchange ritual gazes with his devotees. The concept of darshana also allowed a thematic link to be maintained between the earlier religious work (mainly sculptures) and later paintings from the Mughal court of northern India. In a highly unusual step for Muslim rulers, the Mughal emperors displayed themselves to their subjects twice each day in a ritual they boldly termed darshana — the very same word used for the worship of Hindu gods.

The exhibition’s sub-title, Art and the Experience in India, highlights the fact that the meaning of art in India is inextricably linked with the architectural spaces in which these works are installed. (See George Michell’s article in this issue of artonview). Not only as an image in a Hindu temple approached differently from those in Buddhist and Jain temples, but within each type of temple there is also a hierarchy of imagery During the journey to the image of the presiding deity, the worshipper passes a range of images including auspicious guardians, sub-deities related to the main deity of worship and didactic scenes.

In order to recreate at least part of this spatial experience, the National Gallery was fortunate to obtain the services of Ross Feller, an Australian architect now resident in Canberra, who designed In the Image of Man at the Hayward Gallery (see his article also in this issue of artonview).

Another aim of Kings is to highlight the best of Indian art in Australian collections and, thereby, o see some of the National Gallery's Indian objects in a broader context. The Vision of Kings will also be used as the occasion to launch the Gallery's latest major acquisition of Asian art, an extraordinary bronze image of the Hindu god Shiva - Shiva as Nataraja (the Lord of Dance) – an illustration introduces this text. Paintings from the Gayer-Anderson Gift, transferred to the National Gallery in 1983, will also be featured.

In devising this exhibition we have kept firmly in mind the success of The Age of Angkor, held at the National Gallery in 1992. The spontaneous reaction of the Cambodian community on that occasion in making offerings of flowers to the sculptures serves as a potent reminder of the need to provide an open experience for viewers.

Michael Brand
Curator of Asian Art, National Gallery of Australia
from Artonview, Summer 1995-96.